This blog began as a description of our life in Al Ain, UAE (United Arab Emirates). Brn worked at the UAE University Libraries Deanship for three years and Bss homeschooled our four children, D, B, P, and O. After returning to the the USA for five years, we are living in Abu Dhabi now.

2006/08/10

Roundabouts of Al Ain #1

This is the first of what should be on ongoing series of pictures of the statues and fountains in the roundabouts of Al Ain.

First up is the Sheik Zayed Roundabout:

This rounadabout is on Khalifa Street, one block of the Islamic Institute (boys campus of UAE University). You can see it on Google Maps here. As you can see, it has a pretty interesting statue of Sheik Zayed and four palm trees.

Here is a closer view of the top. Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if the brass colored metal supposed to symbolize anything? Maybe a moon cresent?

Below that is this, which I assume is stylized Arabic writing. I have a terrible time reading stylized Arabic, but it looks like it begins with aleph and ends with ya and ra. Can anyone tell me what the rest of it is?

For the last picture, the word written is Al Khair, next to the palm tree. Khair means goodness / kindness / wealth depending on the context. From the palm tree next to it, it propably is meant as goodness from Dates.

I just noticed that Al Khair was placed under Sheikh Zayed's profile. It is refering to Zayed Al Khair, which he is sometimes called because he brought wealth and prosperity to his people and is well loved and remembered.

I never was able to get the link to Google map working for me, anybody having the same problem? I also tried this many times before (getting a map of any city in UAE on google) with no luck, any idea?ThanksAsh